Table of Contents



Introduction

Welcome again, today we are starting our series for Windows Phone in which we would concentrate over BLEND and it's use for designing interface of Windows Phone.

We would use Expressions Blend that comes up with Visual Studio 2013.

As this is our starter so lets start with IDE's overview. What tabs it contains and for what purpose they are for.

  1. Data Tab
  2. Objects and Timeline
  3. Device Tab
  4. Assets Tab
  5. Visual States States Tab
  6. Toolbox

1. Data Tab:

 Lets start with Data Tab , Data Tab is there in Blend for dealing with data. That may include creating data, creating sample data, defining data context, creating sample data from a C# class or even creating sample data from XML file or online XML source.




2. Objects and Timelines:

Objects and Time line tab is for our complete layout of windows phone application. It tells us about that what objects it has in it. That might be a button , that might be a Grid or any type of container. All the animations and story boarding is done via this tab.


3. Device Tab :

Device Tab is basically for  applying different accent colours and device settings. Now a developer need not to run it's application each time on different emulator. Just by help of device tab you can manage these things easily.



4. Assets Tab:

 Assets tab is for managing assets  all your controls, behaviors and different type of other controls are available in this very tab.



5. Toolbox:

Toolbox is a tab containing different tools. That is pen tool , gradiant tool , selection tool and all other tools are included in this toolbox.




Changing Theme and Accent colours from Device tab:


From your device tab you can change the accent colour and theme as well. As you should know that there are two themes of Windows Phone dark and light. So you need not to run your application each time just go to the device tab and change theme option from dark to light and yes you are done.



Change Accent Colour from Device panel:


You can set your resource's colour to system brush resources using the property tab that is aside Data tab.





Select the resource that is Phone Accent Brush Colour and now you can change the accent colour from device tab and can test your application with different accent colours.

Conclusion

So this was a brief introduction to Blend's IDE . See you people next time with a new topic.